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The writer is senior director for economics at Opportunity Green, a think-tank
The Trump administration’s attempted reshaping of the global economic order via a sweeping new tariff regime is producing inadvertent opportunities for the rest of the world. “America First” policies are opening new spaces for action on climate change.
This has not been immediately obvious. Trump’s disdain for climate science is notorious. His energy secretary, Chris Wright, has pledged more fossil fuel investment. The “grand global economic reordering” promised by Treasury secretary Scott Bessent included a contemptuous turn away from multilateral action on climate change. The US, as it did under the first Trump administration, has left the Paris Agreement on global emissions and is withdrawing support for domestic renewables.
However, new figures from Opportunity Green show that whatever the intentions of the Trump government, some effects of its tariffs are actually likely to be positive for climate change. Shipping carries 80 per cent of the global goods trade, amounting to 12bn tonnes annually. The distances those goods move have increased hugely in the past few decades, as manufacturing has shifted from Europe and North America to east Asia. A large container ship will travel three-quarters of the distance to the Moon in a year. But those ships have to burn fuel — and that fuel burn generates a little over 911mn tonnes of carbon dioxide and its equivalents annually.
As tariffs force the rerouting and resourcing of manufactured goods, less gets shipped and over shorter distances. In turn, that reduces fuel use and fuel burn. The benefit here is that even relatively small differences in weights and transport distances, as goods are rerouted or resourced, can add up to meaningful reductions in emissions across a massive global trading system. In a world where carbon budgets are increasingly tight, every extra emissions reduction counts.
Our estimates show that in 2023, global shipping transport of electrical machinery alone came to 6.5 per cent of the total volume of emissions — or 12.03mn tonnes of CO₂e. That’s the equivalent of two years’ worth of flights between London and New York. Opening up the containers allows us to show even more closely the effects of tariffs on emissions. Trump’s imposition, in June, of 50 per cent charges on imports of steel-constructed manufactured goods, like washing machines and dishwashers, affect items that accounted for two weeks’ worth of those same return flights.
If these are substituted for local production, or ready-made products are more often repaired and reused locally, shipping weights and distances are reduced — and with them, greenhouse gas emissions. This is the key link for turning the new tariff regime into climate harm reductions.
A “right to repair”, for example, as now instituted in California and the EU, legally restricting the ability of manufacturers to lock consumers out of their own products, can promote jobs in repair and reprogramming, and so reduce the demand for the shipping of new products. Where new manufacturing is increasingly automated and lacking in job opportunities, repair work remains more labour intensive and, of necessity, has to be done near to where a product, whether a dishwasher or a mobile phone, is actually being used.
As such, “America First” could come to mean “repair in America first”. For the rest of the world, Trump’s chaotic overturning of the global trading system is inadvertently creating the opportunity for some rare win-wins: reducing emissions from transportation on one side, while on the other, promoting domestic job creation in manufacturing and, especially, the recycling, repair and reuse of existing products.
